In Act III of ”Romeo and Juliet,” Mercutio, soon to be a grave man, issues a curse: ”A plague o` both your houses! They have made worms` meat of me.”
In addition to being competent with the language, Shakespeare knew his vermicology. Worms do indeed like decaying organic matter: grass clippings, cardboard, the corpse of a fatally stabbed cousin of a star-crossed lover-most anything that falls under the once-living rubric.
It is this undiscriminating quality, along with a confluence of environmental circumstances, that makes Jim McNelly think he can make earthworms work wonders, both for his bankbook and for humanity.
It would seem a lofty ascension for such a lowly life form. These are hermaphrodites, after all, and subterranean ones at that. They can`t see, and they can`t hear. They have distinguished themselves in the public imagination primarily as fishbait, robin fodder and post-rain stomping targets. But where most people look at a plastic-foam cup packed with earthworms and envision a pan of sizzling bluegills, McNelly looks at that cup and sees soil salvation and trash relief.
McNelly`s grand plan begins with feeding this country`s organic waste-a huge portion of what we throw away-to writhing masses of worms. As is their nature, the worms would hungrily burrow through the stuff until it`s all turned into a rich compost made, essentially, of worm excrement. The compost would be used to recondition exploited topsoil, a worldwide problem that, in McNelly`s estimation, leaves ”a worse debt to the future than the national debt.” Better topsoil for agriculture and less garbage would, in turn, help make the planet a better place, a career goal a teenaged McNelly set for himself back on Earth Day, 1970.
We are, of course, talking about more than a coffee cup full of worms here. Two tons of worms will process about a ton of waste a day, McNelly says. ”If you were to dig your hand in, it would be teeming with worms. If 1 cubic foot of feed”-moistened decaying organic matter-”weighs 35 pounds, you would have better than 5 pounds of worms in it,” he says. ”Without the worms, it would turn anaerobic (be depleted of oxygen) and start to smell and turn sour very quickly.” With the worms, it smells rather pleasant.
Not any worm will do. Nightcrawlers, for instance, are hopeless, because they aren`t willing to live in their food. ”I`ve been using the tiger-striped red worm. It`s about 3 1/2 inches long. It`s a common bait worm. It reproduces rapidly. It`s capapble, theoretically, of doubling its population weekly. It`s capable of consuming its weight in waste daily. It`s an excellent decomposer. It`s highly resilient-it will take a lot of stress. It can function at a wide temperature range. And it`ll eat virtually all forms of organic waste.”
During his 13 years of worm research, based mainly on information developed by the National Science Foundation, McNelly, 37, has come to have a healthy respect for the earthworm. ”I find them actually quite intelligent, if you can believe that. In the way they behave, the way they feed, they`re telling me a lot.” He says they have a keen sense of smell and definite food preferences: cardboard over chicken manure, for instance. One reason he thinks worm technology will work is that, given consistent conditions, worms are so predictable, so constant, acting en masse as one machine.
It is hard not to like worms, he says. They`re strictly saphroditic, meaning they eat only dead things, and ”they don`t bite. They don`t carry diseases. They`re just a part of the natural decomposition chain.”
McNelly-whose college degree, from California State-Fullerton, is in religious studies-says he has endured ”a lot of jokes about `the worm man.`
” ”After people have the initial laugh reaction, I have found them to be quite fascinated. People like worms, even though there`s an initial squeamishness.
”But worms get a lot of bad press. A politician `opens up a can of worms.` Well, a can of worms is a good thing. It means you`re ready to go fishing. And you don`t get worms in your apple, you get insect larvae.
”But I don`t really care that much what people think. I just want to see if they can do a job. To me it`s no different than using yeast to make beer.” McNelly also wouldn`t mind making worms into a viable source of protein for animals, and he has a line he`s worked up that describes this: ”You`ve heard the saying, `You give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; you teach him how to fish, you feed him for life`? Well, I`ve taken it a step beyond that. I would rather teach people how to raise fish food.”
He says it`s only a matter of time before he comes up with a way to produce worms at 5 cents a pound to compete with fish meal. ”I`m fully confident that by 1995, I`ll have developed worm technologies to the point where they`re starting to make a significant contribution to not just waste recycling but food production,” he says.
And he`s not going to turn down the fringe benefits of worm technologies. ”I plan on being rich off of it,” admits McNelly, who`s now working as operations director of a new, more-conventional recycling plant in St. Cloud, Minn., where he continues to refine his vermicomposting (the term for the process) process. ”Yes, I`ve got delusions of grandeur.”
It all sounds slightly fishy, until you consider several things:
– The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources believed in McNelly`s plan to the tune of a $75,000 grant last year to further develop his mechanically assisted process for using worms` digestive tracts to process organic manner into usable products. Working in Madison, McNelly turned the wrigglers loose on yard wastes, to the astonishment of many in the community. ”My job is to try to minimize how much waste is going to landfills and to find alternatives,” says John Reindl, the department`s recycling coordinator. ”One of the ways we do that is to provide some funding to people who come up with innovative ways to recycle materials. And Jim`s idea is certainly a very innovative one that certainly raised a lot of eyebrows around here-including my boss`, who said, `Worms! What are you guys doing down there?` ”
In awarding the grants, for which the recipient must come up with matching funds, Reindl says, ”One thing we look at is, Does the person have a responsible plan of action? We were very impressed with Jim`s level of knowledge, his seriousness. We felt comfortable that he knew what he was talking about, even if it did look outlandish to the rest of us.”
Reindl describes McNelly`s decision to take the Minnesota job, motivated by financial considerations, as ”a great loss to us,” but he still considers McNelly`s work in the state a success. ”I think he`s given us a new technique that will eventually be put to use,” Reindl says.
– It was no less a scientific light than Charles Darwin who made the point that all of the fertile soil in the world at one time had gone through the digestive system of the earthworm, according to Weldon Platt, a California worm specialist. In nature, in addition to providing food for birds and animals galore, they aerate soil and eat decaying organisms. Viewed from this perspective, McNelly`s process is simply a matter of accelerating nature.
– The Fallbrook Sanitary District, a wastewater-treatment agency about 50 miles north of San Diego, is using worms to process about one-quarter of the sewage generated by the approximately 20,000 people it serves.
”We use two species of earthworm that are indigenous to the manure pile behind the farmer`s barn,” says Platt, the district`s vermicomposting-project director. Basically, they put the worms, a bed of straw and the sludge, heat- treated to remove impurities, in outdoor beds 7 by 160 feet and let nature take its course. When a significant volume of worm castings has filtered its way down to the bottom of the beds, the top layer of sludge is scraped off, et voila : compost with a plus.
When Platt and his worms came on the scene two years ago, the district began composting all of its sewage, some by worms, some chemically. ”By going through the process with the earthworms, we have a much higher grade compost,” Platt says. ”With the vermicompost, the only thing you smell is just like a sweet soil. There`s no trace of a noxious odor at all. It`s nice to handle . . . and really easy to work with compared to the other composts that are on the market.”
And it works, he says. Preliminary tests show ”phenomenal growth” in young citrus trees grown in it, and the district is awaiting more
comprehensive tests being conducted by California State Polytechnic University. If the compost is as much a boon to agriculture as Platt thinks, the district will be able to get good prices for a product that many of its counterparts have to pay to get rid of (by dumping their sludge in landfills). And as its worm population grows, there is the possibility that some of them may be sold to anglers. ”They seem to grow real big when they eat sludge,”
he says.
In fact, the whole thing has been such a success, according to Platt, that in the next several months, as its worm population grows, the district will start processing all of its waste the old-fashioned way.
– In addition to McNelly`s already-mentioned concerns about the topsoil quality, the country is also in the midst of a trash-disposal dilemma. The traditional method of disposal-digging a hole and filling it-is looking more and more like a combination of Edsel and Corvair as landfill environmental problems mount, landfill space dwindles and neighbors of potential new dumps fight them furiously.
By some estimates, organic waste accounts for as much as three-fourths of what Americans throw out, waste that theoretically should be able to be returned to the soil. McNelly estimates that less than 5 percent of that is being composted now, most in forward-thinking wastewater- and sewage-treatment facilities, and says the federal Environmental Protection Agency has estimated it will go up to 20 percent in the next five years.
In Wisconsin, says Reindl, of the natural resources department, 15 percent to 20 percent of the state`s waste is yard waste, and another quarter is sludge from paper production. Beginning in 1993, he says, it will be illegal to dump yard waste in a landfill there.
All of which makes McNelly optimistic about the prospects for his process, which, unlike the Fallbrook sewage-treatment method, is indoors and utilizes mechanical means to bring the waste to the worms. He is reluctant to discuss specifics, because his patents are still pending, but he thinks his system has viability particularly for urban and suburban areas, where space is at a premium and nobody wants noxious odors.
”I put in feed at one central point,” he says, ”and then out the backside I get what`s called earthworm castings-waste, that is. And it comes out laden with earthworm cocoons also that I have the choice whether or not to harvest” to increase the stock.
A big advantage to his system, he says, is that the worms are doing most of the work. He says he can process 400 tons of waste a day using a total of about 5 horsepower. It also is space efficient, taking place in a
warehouselike building or even a multistory building. A disadvantage is that the food requires some preconditioning and more moisture than conventional composting, about 20 percent solids for his system versus 40 percent. ”Dry” soil is 70 percent solids.
Among the important tools in McNelly`s research were two related studies on vermicomposting sewage sludge conducted at SUNY-Syracuse and Cornell University from 1974 to 1984, he says. The National Science Foundation sponsored the studies.
According to a patent search he did, his is one of three vermicomposting machines in the world, the other two being British and Italian.
Despite his stated goal of making money-”if it doesn`t make money, it isn`t going to do anyone any good,” he says-McNelly insists his primary reasons are altruistic. A few years after making the Earth Day decision to work with the environment, he was reading an article in a United Nations publication about world food problems. The article argued that the missionary mentality is part of the problem rather than the solution, because it creates a welfare system.
”The article said, If someone could come up with a way of returning organic material to topsoil, it would indirectly solve the world food problem. So I said, `Well, I can do that.` ”
Then he began reading about soils, and the properties of the earthworm piqued his curiosity. While still in college, he made his first compost pile, bought a few pounds of earthworms, and the rest is-or may be-vermihistory.
